Reading
I didn’t finish any books in the last week, but that’s not surprising given my recent return to the office for work and the gargantuan books I’m currently reading.
I’m about 85% done with The Gathering Storm by Robert Jordan. I should have it done either tonight or tomorrow. Then I will only have 2 more books left before my reread of the Wheel of Time is complete.
I’m continuing Of Empires and Dust by Ryan Cahill. While I’m enjoying the improved writing and the epic scope of the plot, the downside of such epicness is that you often spend 100+ pages away from certain characters. It’s an issue with the Wheel of Time as well, but that comes with the territory.
It can be a little hard to keep certain characters straight after over a year spent away from this world. That too is normal when it comes to reading epic fantasy, but characters having similar names makes that harder (at least at first). We have Dahlen, Dayne, and Dann, all of whom are main characters. It’s usually through the side characters that I’m reminded which “D” I’m currently following.
I also started another (long) book because I have no self-control. Black River Orchard by Chuck Wendig is an epic horror novel about a small town that is overcome with a delicious new apple that a stumbling farmer grows in his orchard. I’ve only just started this novel. I’m about 10% in, and while some spooky stuff has happened, there is no indication where this story will go. I’m liking it so far. I’ve DNF’d Chuck Wendig before, but that was for bashing me over the head with a startling lack of subtlety (Wanderers). So far, Wendig’s writing style hasn’t put me off, and he balances his (sometimes) cringey use of modern teenage colloquialisms with some sharp prose.
Writing
There was a discussion in my writing group’s Discord recently about the fact that most of the writers have had a hard time having stories accepted this year for publication. These are writers who’ve had more success than me in the past, so their lack of publishing credits this year is a bit odd. Most of my fellow writers had anywhere between 1-5 story acceptances last year. The most anyone has had so far this year is 1.
Some think that there’s more writers submitting to fewer publications, which is causing the uptick in rejections. Others are simply baffled and are unsure what to do, besides keep submitting, of course.
I’ve had the most rejections these past 2 years than I’ve ever had, but that’s because I’ve been submitting more than I ever have. That hasn’t made the lack of acceptances easier to swallow. The last story I had published was “The Apartment” in Tales to Terrify back in February 2024. That story was a reprint, so if you want to count the last original story I had accepted, then that would be “The Incorruptible Corpse” in Horror Hill back in April 2023 (check out my publications page for links to listen to these stories). Since then, I’ve received 31 rejections over 7 stories, with one of my stories being rejected 11 times. This sounds like a lot, but a lot of writers will submit a story 20+ times before it gets accepted.
Shifting my focus to writing a novel hasn’t helped in the short story camp either. I have about a half dozen stories that I’ve had critiqued by my group but I haven’t touched yet. I still want to get to them, but I want to nail down a rough draft of Mythos before I give them another go.
Speaking of Mythos, I mentioned last week that I was stuck and needed a new direction. I’ve started making moves in that direction, with a new opening chapter that changes the trajectory of the story. I’ve written a good few pages, but you wouldn’t be able to tell based on word count alone; I’ve been deleting old paragraphs as I go. There are whole chapters that will get the ax, while I’ll be preserving some passages to use in my second attempt. The word count will probably hover around the same number until I catch up to myself and start moving forward again.
MYTHOS – First Draft progress report: 26,802/120,000 – 22.3%
+1,922 up from last week
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What have you been reading and/or writing this week? Let me know in the comments below.
The Night Bulletin 